Saturday, November 28, 2015

The problem with memory is that it is stored in the brain
and it survives by being kept up to date by the operating system of the brain,
that thing which we call the mind. Now, because memory is being constantly
updated there’s a better than average chance of there being a flaw, ever how
slight, in the copy, and therefore the entire memory becomes suspect over time.
Usually we’re happy with this arrangement because the memory can be refreshed
by reality. We couldn’t recall the exact lyrics to a song we liked five years
ago but if it comes on the radio we merrily sing along with it as if we’ve
practiced it for years, which we have, in a way, because it’s stored in our
memory.

Six or seven years ago, I cannot remember how long, isn’t
that a hell of a way to start out, I met a woman who had a great body and dark
hair. The next time I saw her she had lightened her hair considerably, and I
commented on it and a connection was made between us. We dated, became close,
and one day I asked her why she had changed her hair from very dark to very
light. She countered that it hadn’t really been that dark, but I remembered
that it had been. It was an odd sticking point but I conceded that she likely
knew more about her hair than I did. Odd thing was that while we were dating
someone else commented they liked her hair very dark, like she used to have it.

Now, let’s go back even deeper in time, back in the early
80’s when I was stationed at Fort Gordon near Augusta. I tried several
different routes through Middle Georgia to get to South Georgia and none of
them were easy or quick. At some point in that time I must have passed through
the same part of Middle Georgia I passed through in the late eighties, when I
went to visit a friend in Warren County. Now, here we are in 2015, on
Thanksgiving Day, and I’m on my way to South Carolina and I pass by an
abandoned school. There was this odd sense of veja vu. Not that I had been
there before, no, but the feeling that this had been a dreamscape, and that I
had formed a dream from memory, the most elusive of realities. In the dream, in
this dreamscape of the abandoned school, I was walking under the shelter to the
busses and somewhere in that school I had hidden something that I wanted to get
back but had no idea how to do it with so many people around. I found it odd
that so many students were waiting outside, even under the shelter, risking
getting wet, when they could have waited inside. I was looking for a girl I
knew, and I wouldn’t see her again because the school was closing.

Ready for some weirdness?

I have no idea at all the condition of this building as I
passed by it, if I indeed had ever passed by it, but Thanksgiving Day of 2015 I
went by it and saw it, in broad daylight, as a building sitting in an overgrown
lot with high weeds encroaching on all sides. That was it should have looked
like if what was to be in the dream transpired. The school had been abandoned,
the girl forever lost to me, and some ill-gotten gains recovered or not, who is
to say?

This edifice stayed in my mind from Thanksgiving Day to the
next, and I was looking for it on my way back. There it was, too. Fully
functional, nicely groomed, and obviously it had been for quite some time. No
field expedient lawn care company had swept in on Thanksgiving Day to clean the
place up. At some point I came upon the building, saw it for what my memory
told me I would see, like hearing the lyrics of a song wrong, and the next day…
Which memory is correct?

The woman’s hair, the condition of a school building I may
or may not have seen over thirty years ago, when it comes to memory, what is to
be trusted and what cannot be trusted? You get into a car and you feel
comfortable you’ll arrive at some destination that’s stored in your mind but at
the same time, how long did it take to find your keys?

You trust your memory to remind you to take your meds, or
that you have taken your meds, or to skip your meds, yet you cannot remember
what you had for lunch yesterday without some effort of thought, and even then,
are you sure? Can you be?

We’ve all heard about some elderly person who drove for
hours because their mind simply let the memories go of familiar places. That
only happens to old people and those with brain diseases, right? When it
happens to us, those of us who consider themselves in command of their
facilities, how to explain it away? Does the mind simply sweep it under the
mental rug to keep from having to face the idea that the mind itself is a
flawed creature? This is paramount to a long distance runner getting tired
after running a block. A glitch? A sign of aging? Is disease setting in? Or has
this been happening all your life and it’s just getting to the point you now
have age to blame it on?

I wonder if I can find the school on Google and bring forth
a photo for you? Can I remember where it is close enough to find it without
searching for it at great length?

What if it never existed at all?

Like the woman’s dark hair, either she doesn’t remember it
correctly or two people do not remember it correctly, or there’s some place in
between all of this where a long dead reality resides unknown and unknowable.

Somewhere out there, in my mind or Middle Georgia, is a
school I never went to and will likely never see again, yet here it is, you
will either remember it because of these words, or you will forget it, too.

Friday, November 27, 2015

First off, given the title of this essay, I would like to
introduce my fuel gauge as an asshole of the First Order. After I drive two
hundred miles, my fuel gauge announces that I have used but a quarter of the
gas in my tank. This means I can drive another five hundred, ninety-nine miles
without refueling but my gas gauge is an asshole. After fifty more miles it
tells me that I have used up more than a half a tank.

Asshole.

During the last two days I have driven over seven hundred
fifty miles. Other than my fuel gauge outright lying to me, I’ve decided there
are two devices that ought to be mandatory in all vehicles and the use of these
two devices ought to be enforced to the point that getting a ticket for not
using either would be expensive to the extreme. Or someone ought to drag the
drivers out and beat them with a cane.

The first are turn signals, also known as blinkers, because
very clearly there are those drivers out there who cannot seem to fathom the
idea that they are used to indicate a change in lane or an advanced warning for
a turn. One thing I learned in the last seven hundred and fifty miles is there
are a lot of people on the interstate that either have no turn signal, which
they need to get fixed, or they have one and haven’t been shown how to use it,
which they need to learn, or they know how to use it, it does work, but they
choose not to engage their turn signals in a timely basis or not at all.

Assholes.

The second device I think ought to be mandatory is cruise
control. An odd pick, you might think, for most were thinking of an automatic
plasma rifle in the forty watt range, but no, cruise control. Here’s why: I left South Carolina this morning an hour
before dawn to beat some of the worst traffic. Basically, at that time if day
you’ll have fewer human being and by default, fewer assholes. I’m cruising
along in the middle lane of three, when this minivan come out from the far
right lane and cuts me off causing me to have to hit my brakes. They acerbate
the situation by immediately slowing down. Why? Because they’re assholes, that’s
why. If they had cruise control or knew how to use a turn signal things might
have been better, but things were worse because as they passed me they, and
myself, began climbing a hill. This caused them to slow down. So I passed them,
because now they’re going five miles an hour slower than I am. Once we get
going downhill, you guessed it! They passed me again.

Assholes.

Now, as dawn began to break I noticed a bumper sticker, as
they passed me for the third time, that read “I Love Saint Jude’s” and I wonder
if they thought about their own kids climbing around in that minivan while the
driver engaged in some fairly wicked assholery. Finally, I camped out in the Hammer
Lane, and watched them go back and forth with another truck in the middle and
slow lanes. This went on from South Carolina until I finally had enough and
pulled into a rest stop in Georgia. No kidding, this went on for about an hour
with the driver of the minivan not realizing he was changing speeds faster than
Donald Trump insults people.

Ass.

Holes.

Let’s also have an honorable mention to the Asshole who
pulled up behind me at a gas station with ten gazillion other pumps, three
quarters of which were not being used. No, he had to pull up behind me, with a
foot of my truck, and then looked at me as if I were holding him up or
something. Of course, if my fuel gauge wasn’t an asshole, this wouldn’t have
happened, would it?

And then there was the Asshole who passed me from the Hammer
lane while I was in the middle lane, and just as soon as he realized there was
a BIG FUCKIN RV in the slow lane he had to lock’em down and duck back behind
me, nearly clipping me. YOU DIDN’T SEE THAT HUGE FUCKING RV? REALLY?

ASSHOLE!

And at last, let’s not forget the semi, who once I was off the
Interstate, passed me on the back two lane road that is supposed to be safer
and slower, passed the tractor ahead of me who (asshole) was doing about
twenty, and nearly killed hit the car that I was waiting to go past before I
passed the tractor. A half mile ahead are train tracks which, because he’s a
tanker truck, has to stop at anyway.

Saturday, November 21, 2015

Sunday, November 15, 2015

The problem with war, as I have pointed out many time over the
years, is it’s like tossing a handful of unknown seeds into the air and then
coming back a year later hoping to harvest a certain crop. You may have some
idea what might happen but in the end that rarely is what happens. It’s one of
those strange things that whatever reason you go to war and whatever outcome
you might imagine the reality of war is unknown and unknowable. That’s why
anyone with a sense of history avoids it all cost if they care about humanity.

If you look at the war in Syria it seems like a fairly cut
and dried problem; the man running the country is an evil human being and
getting him out would mean good things, right? But that was the case in Iraq.
We discovered that by interjecting a massive amount of firepower and money into
a region and then destroying the political infrastructure, we created a massive
amount of power that emptied that part of the world of a lesser power, and then
we left leaving a vacuum that was filled by the most violent entity that arose
after we were gone.

Anyone who reads history saw this coming.

What all armed conflicts cause is a massive amount of both
soldiers and arms left over once some semblance of peace has been cobbled together.
After the American Civil War both sides contributed to the wayward and senseless
slaughter in Kansas and the American West. The native population of this region
should have known as soon as the combatants were done tearing their own country
apart they would look to keep the battle going with someone else.

The very sad truth in all of this is as long as there is an
obscene profit to be made in war there will be those who will sell arms to
anyone, and worse, everyone, so that no one is left without the means to kill a
lot of human beings as swiftly as possible. The Americans left billions of
dollars’ worth of war material in Iraq and those who opposed the Americans also
invested in arms so what to do with all that equipment meant for humans to wage
war on one another?

We might not like to admit it and we certainly aren’t going
to speak aloud about the root causes of terrorism, what happened in Paris was something
that has happened many times before in many places, recently, and in the past.
Anyone psychotic enough and sociopathic enough to run a terrorism campaign successfully
also knows that the only way to keep the war alive is to keep killing people.
And they also know as long as they can kill there will be those willing to fund
the killing so even more weapons can be sold. More than ideology, pure
predatory capitalism, in other words greed, fuels terrorism.

Without money terrorism ceases to exist on a global level.
Without greed the need to fund terrorism ceases to exist. Without war, the
industry which supplies the basic needs and the basic conditions for terrorism ceases
to exist.

Paris will happen again and again just as long as we, the
people of planet Earth, continue to fund it. As long as we listen to those who
would divide us with religion, politics, false nationalism, and invented racial
rifts, we will continue to fall prey to delivering our resources to those who
plan, begin, propagate, and profit from war, conflict, fear, and terrorism.

At some point in time, we as a species, will have to realize
that resources are finite and we must care for these resources or we will most
certainly become extinct, along with most of the species that share this earth
with us. Yet as long we fall prey to the conditions of greed and war, we will
see only those false and immediate threats that devour our spirits as well as
our time, our treasure, our humanity and our young.

Tuesday, November 10, 2015

In 1979 I was voted “Most Likely To Die Before 21” by my
High School peers. This wasn’t printed in our yearbook or anything like that
but it was widely assumed that I would be dead, and dead very soon. I spent
more time in my Senior year passed out in the parking lot than in the
classroom. In today’s world someone would get involved in something like that
but back then serious drinking was what men did and I did it too. My problem
wasn’t a secret to anyone who had known me for any length of time at all.

I turned fifty-five on Monday which is a terrible day on
which to have a birthday. Worse, it rained all day long, but I decided to stay
home, socialize with the mutts, and write this. I’m still alive, by the way.
All attempts at causing anything other than this condition have clearly failed.

I’ve been shot at once in my life and I didn’t like it. I’ve
never shot at anyone. I held a gun on a deputy once but that was a
misunderstanding and I had a cop in Tampa hold a gun on me once, and that also
was a misunderstanding, but when it comes to guns there cannot be
misunderstanding without the very real possibility of tragedy. But I am still
alive.

There have been four wrecks since 1979 and I’ve managed to
walk away from all of them without serious injury. The last was in 2013 and
because I was doing Yoga three times a week I wasn’t even sore.

A friend of mine, a lifelong friend of mine, died in 2013.
Smoking finally caught up to him, as we all knew it would, and back in 1985 he
told me he thought he would live longer than he would. We talked about that,
even when he was going through chemo and radiation and all of that stuff, he
never truly gave up the idea he might beat it. It’s hard to grasp the ending of
life and I thought I had made peace with it decades ago but I realized when my
friend died that I hadn’t. Or maybe I’m more willing to let go of my own life
than anyone else’s. I can deal with my own death because I don’t have to but
losing someone else is a lot harder.

A car crash took the lives of five young men I knew back in
1980. It was a strange thing, really, for five people to die at once, that
quickly, and I didn’t even know about it until after the funerals. A log truck
driven by a man with a history of seizures crossed over into their lane and in
whatever time it takes for two vehicles to slam into one another was how long
it took for five lives to end. Hopes and dreams, loves and memories, bodies and
souls, all of that was gone in less than a second. I still remember my sister
calling and telling me about it.

Of course, back when
no one thought I was going to live long enough to be able to see twenty-one, I
didn’t have a niece of a nephew, and neither of my sisters had been married. It
would take another twenty-two years before I would get married and that ended
poorly, but we both lived through it. No one saw me joining the Army, surviving
that, and no one ever thought I would live to see thirty, or forty, or, damn,
fifty.

Yet I am still here.

Do they ever wonder, those people who saw me carried out of
class in High School, limp as a wet rag and unconscious, did they ever stop and
wonder that perhaps even as large of a wreck as I might have been, that even at
that very moment, I was outliving them? They colored inside of the lines,
showed up for class, studied hard, went to church, and now, forty years later,
I’m still here. How does this sort of thing happen? How did life not punish
someone who lived on the edge for that long? I hitchhiked across country,
smoked more pot than any other two people in High School, drank like a fish,
lived in terrible neighborhoods, caught venomous snakes barehanded, and dated
redheads.

How the hell am I still alive?

The simple truth is life is filled with chances to die every
day. Some people are lucky and some people are not. I’ve been lucky to the
extreme and some people die young for no good reason. For all my addictions and
habits I have pretty much lived a quiet life for the last twenty-five years or
so. I’ve rescued dogs and one or two humans. I’ve read more than any two people
back in High School and I’m pretty sure I’ve written more than anyone else who
ever knew me. I think at this age I’ve pretty much outlived all the bitter old
women who tormented me in grade school. They’ve torn down that building that I
regarded as a prison. I meet people who tell me that High School was the best
four years of their lives and I can only pity them for that.

It’s odd, really, being fifty-five. It’s like being in a
place I had no idea I was going, didn’t want to be there, but here I am.
There’s a good half dozen or so people I would like to speak with before I die
and I would like to ask them was it worth it, to live by the rules, and to not
do the things that Mike did, and to spend a life in the same small town waiting
to join the rest of the family in the same grave plot, I mean, really?

I do not feel fifty-five. I feel as if there are more rules
to be broken, more excess to be explored, and more memories to be made. I feel
a certain kinship with that kid back in High School where everyone was sure he
was going to die, just because he lived.

Sunday, November 8, 2015

It was a little warm for a letter jacket but Terry wanted
everyone to see him wearing it before he handed it over to Debbie. Everyone
already knew they were going steady, and everyone was so jealous. She wanted to
wear the jacket to the concert but hadn’t said so, and Terry wanted her to ask.
He wanted her to ask him to take it off, and he was going to, but she had to
let him take her shirt off first. Debbie had been very firm up until last night
about letting him touch her but last night… Today, however, ARS was playing
here, in Dothan Alabama, and Terry had great seats. Coach Riverdale had somehow
gotten four tickets and so he, the backup quarterback Michael and his girl,
Cill, and Debbie were off to their first trip in Terry’s father’s car. Man, was
this great or what? He was the youngest starting quarterback ever at Hopkins
High. His driver’s license wasn’t a
month old and he was already at a ARS concert with Debbie. But right now he had
to pee.

He used the bathroom and washed his hands and something was
all over them. Something came out of the water faucet and…Terry looked up and
there was a monster in the mirror. He screamed, fell, and scrambled to get up
but nearly fell again. His legs…his..oh God. Where was he? Terry looked around
and he was not in Dories Auditorium. He was in a tiny stinking bathroom and it
was incredibly cold. He stood up and the monster looked back at him from the
mirror. Terry took a step back and fell again. His legs didn’t work at all. He
hurt his arm and when he looked at his hands he screamed again. They were
covered with sores and they were wrinkled, shriveled, and veins bugled out.

“Oh God” Terry whimpered.

He pulled himself up and looked in the mirror. The monster
was him. His hair was long, greasy, and matted. His face was wrinkled too, and
his teeth were yellow and crooked. There was a couple missing. PAIN! Suddenly
his body was racked with pain. His knees hurt, his back hurt, his mouth hurt,
and Terry moaned out loud. What the hell was this? He pulled at the hair and it
hurt, too, the hair was real. He shuffled to the door, crying, and when he
opened it a blast of cold air hit him. Snow fluttered around him and Terry
walked out into the freezing cold. What had happened? Where was he? Terry
staggered back into the bathroom and stared at the mirror. He was a million
years old, at least. How could this be? Terry tried to remember something,
anything, but his last memory was of going to the bathroom in Dothan. Was this
Dothan? Did he get amnesia and…? Terry doubled over and threw up. Blood. There
was blood in his puke. Oh Jesus. Pain racked his body and Terry fell into the
puke. He tried to get up and fell again. His legs, his legs didn’t work right,
his back hurt, his hips were on fire, and…

“Okay, Kevin, get the hell out of there dammit, Jesus you’re
bleeding, just get the hell out will you?”
A policeman stood in the doorway.

“Please, Officer, please help me, my name isn’t Kevin, I’m…,
“ Terry tried to explain but the cop grabbed him and flung him out of the door.

“I’ll Taz the hell out of you, you stupid jerk, now get the
hell out before I start cracking some ribs.” The cop advanced on Terry and
before he could stand up the cop kicked him. “Go on, get the hell out of here,
dammit.”

Terry half crawled and was half kicked away from the
bathroom. He was at a gas station but there were a lot of pumps, and the cars…
Terry stood up and stared. None of the cars looked right. They were smaller
than his dad’s Monte Carlo by far, and no one had a Trans Am or… Terry stumbled
towards the parking lot and nothing seemed real. There were tall buildings,
snow, and small cars. Where was he? Almost everyone he saw was talking to the
palm of their hands held up to their heads, or poking at something in their
hands. What were they doing? He stumbled away from the gas station and down the
street. There was a bar of some sort and they had the biggest television terry
had ever seen in his life. The thing was enormous. Wait! The giant televisions
were everywhere! The bar had one on every wall.

“Hey!” a man said to him, “Beat it!”

Terry stumbled away and sat down on the curb of the street.
He hurt all over. His ribs ached. Terry looked through his pockets and found
nothing at all worth anything at all. A newspaper rolled like tumbleweed past
him and he grabbed it. The print was small, and blurry, but he could make out
the date; 4 February, 2011. Terry stopped breathing for a few seconds. 2011?
2011? Oh God he was..fifty? No. No. He couldn’t be fifty! He looked at his
hands. His body ached. Where was he? The paper was from Las Vegas, Nevada. What
was he doing here?

Terry found another gas station and watched the cars. He saw
one every once in a while that looked familiar but mostly they were alien. The
people were talking and pushing buttons and he saw tiny television screen in
odd looking vans. The billboards were giant televisions too, and the people
looked weird. Some of them had bits of metal stuck in their faces. Terry
couldn’t figure it out. How did this happen? What had happened to him?

“Are you okay, sir?” There was a woman standing there, with
a bible.

“My name is Terry Sirmans, “Terry said, “and I am lost.”

The woman took him to a shelter and they fed him, and gave
him some new clothes. “I want to call my mom, “ Terry said, and they explained
to him how a “cell phone” worked. Terry punched in his parents’ number and
waited. The thought hit him like a hammer. They were likely dead by now. What
if they had moved?

“Hello?” it was a woman’s voice, but she sounded very young.

“My name is Terry Sirmans, “ Terry blurted out.

“I’m sorry you have the wrong number,” the woman said and
hung up.

Was his parents dead? Terry felt his eyes water and he
wondered what the hell had happened to him. When did they die? What had
happened? Did they know where he was? Has he been…? What? What had he been?

“Would you like to look for your family on the Internet?”
The bible woman suggested. Terry couldn’t remember her name.

“The what?”

“The Internet?” The woman asked again. “Face Book, maybe?”

Terry still couldn’t get over the “lap top” which looked
like a tv had mated with a typewriter. But the bible woman had found his old
address, and they had looked at the house he felt was still his home. They
couldn’t find his parents.

“Debbie Smitheart.” Terry blurted out, and the woman began
to type. They found a Debbie Smitheart
Collins in his hometown and the bible woman sent this woman an “instant
message”. The woman led Terry to a room with a cot and he fell asleep almost
immediately. It was a dream. He would be back home in his own bed when he woke
up.

“Mr. Sirmans?” It was the woman. Terry looked around and it
was light again. He hurt all over. The woman handed him a tiny phone.

“Hello?” he spoke into the phone.

“Who is this?” a woman asked.

“My name is Terry Sirmans” Terry said.

“What year did you graduate from High School?” the woman
asked.

“I didn’t,” Terry said, “I went to a concert one night and
suddenly I was here. I don’t remember anything past that night, Who is this?”

“This is Debbie.” And suddenly it sounded like her.

“Debbie?” Terry tried to remember what she looked like.

“Terry, your folks moved to Montgomery. They’re still alive.
Oh god is it really you?”

Terry sat on the edge of the bed in the hotel room and
stared at the television. It was huge, and flat as a pancake. His brother,
Richard was flying up to get him and take him home. But Terry wondered what
home would be like. What had happened to him? Why was he so old? He had spent
hours talking to doctors and looking at their internet and so much had happened
to the world since that night. What had happened? It was time. He walked down
to the hotel lobby and waited. A man was walking towards him, Richard? And
there was a much younger man with him, was this Richard’s son, they looks so
much alike. Suddenly Terry realized how much time was gone.

“Did you do this to someone?” Colleen asked. “Why? Why would
you, why would any one of you, do this to someone?”

“Why did you take the life of the animal that you took for
breakfast, Colleen?” Rhiannon asked. “You think it cruel to use a human being
in this manner? How many animals spend their lives in a cage for your
amusement, or tied to a tree until they die of old age?”

“You stole his life.” Colleen was furious.”You ruined the
lives of everyone who loved him.”

“This is still kinder than how you treat those animals you
use. I needed a host. He was a host. It’s the same way you use animals. ”
Rhiannon said simply. “And I do not like your tone.”

“I apologize.” Colleen said. She looked down.”It won’t
happen again.”

“See that it does not.” Rhiannon told her. “Regal cannot
protect you from me, and you know it.”

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

The woodpecker tree has fallen. I never could get a good
photo of it while it was standing because there are, there were, so many other
trees around it, but now that it’s on the ground I can explore it at my leisure.
It was tall enough to hit the trail and I didn’t think it was, but about two
meters of it slammed into the dogs’ path late last night or sometime today. We’ve
gotten over four inches of rain here in the last twenty-four hours and I
suspect that had something to do with it. It’s a little sad to see it down. The
damn thing had stood up there, dead as a hammer, for years.

I remember when it first died, and started losing limbs, I
started to cut it down then because of the threat to the dogs, but the woodpeckers need such trees. They find their food in rotted trees and they build
their nests there, too. Most people will take dead trees down very quickly and
this is a good thing from a human point of view, or even a dog point of view,
but from the point of view of the woodpeckers it’s a death sentence. So the
tree stood there and did what trees do when they die yet die standing.

Most people do not realize that trees simply die. They get
hit by lightning or they get a disease and some trees aren’t long lived to
begin with. But this was an Oak tree and I suspect it was lightning or bugs but
not lightning bugs. Whatever killed it did so quickly and after a while the
woodpeckers discovered the vacancy sign was lit.

Before the woodpeckers moved in there had to be a transition
between life and death. We humans couldn’t produce anything similar to a tree
to save our lives, and we might want to think about that. This is a structure
that stands upright with nearly all of its mass above its center of gravity. It
withstands hurricanes and storms yet it still stands. It carries a bough full
of leaves and limbs and branches high into the sky yet even never fails. Even
in death, the limbs and branches fall, yet there is the trunk, ten meters tall,
standing as if death itself must wait on trees to fully die.

The very top of the tree and a couple of limb broke off last
year and one piece was driven deeply into the ground. This is a real hazard,
but I’ll take photos of the tree and you might be amazed; there is no sign the dogs
have traveled around this tree in a couple of years. That’s right, the dogs,
all of them, have avoided getting near the dead tree. Do they know? I think
they do. What this does is keep my mutts safe, certainly, but it also allows
underbrush to grow near the tree which means saplings have risen up near the
tree. A parent tree, even in death, protects its young.

So seasons have come and gone, years have come and gone,
dogs have come and gone, yet there’s this dead tree, a condo for wood peckers,
hanging in there and standing like a wooden obelisk waiting for this day to
arrive. A couple of months ago I noticed a lean to it and too some pictures of
it. I know full well that once a dead tree starts leaning the end isn’t too far
away at all. Now, the home of wood peckers becomes the home for all the land
dwelling wood eaters and eventually, this tree will become soil.

I’m very likely to line my compost pile with the corpse of
this tree. It’s perfect for the job and there’s very few things that go a
compost pile as good as those things that are already eating away at the dead
tree. There’s a virtual soup of living creatures in that wood, large and small,
and the compost pile needs the residents. Compost kickstarter ex woodpecker
condo; it sounds like an alternate rock band from Colorado.

Yet with all of this comes some sadness. A tree has died and
finally fallen. Part of my daily routine in walking with the dogs was to try
and spot wood peckers on that tree, to see if it was still there, and wonder if
and when it would finally go. It was, and still is, a testament of how perfectly
well evolution has shaped trees to be the sky reachers and sunlight drinkers
that they are. Nature has perfected the tree so that even as it dies it becomes
useful to other creatures and when it falls it feeds many more. In life and in
death, trees are some of the most versatile and certainly the most beautiful beings
that have ever inhabited this earth. Unlike most organisms, and certainly
unlike humans, as they reach their full maturity they serve a vast number of
other species, with shade, food, homes, as a travel way for squirrels, a rest
stop for birds, and for an oxygen pump for everything that breathes on this
planet.

As the compost pile is blessed by the parts of the tree that
decompose, my garden will issue forth peppers and tomatoes and yes, flowers,
that will feed upon what was once this tree. There will be no waste, there will
be no remnants except those that are alive because of what the tree gave. There
will be insects that come to feed on my garden and there will be birds who
capture them and eat them, and all of this because of a tree, because of all
trees, and because this is the way that nature has always been, if we allow
Her.

The tree has fallen; its reign in that part of the sky is
now over. My world is a little less than what it was when that tree lived and
when it stood. Yet I will follow my obligation to see that which stood in the sky
will return to the earth, again.

Monday, November 2, 2015

“Hey DeMurrey, I hear you’re leaving us,” the guard said and
Larry couldn’t remember his name. The new prison was full of new faces and he
couldn’t keep up with everyone’s name anymore.

“Yeah, me and the wife are moving to Florida,” Larry
replied. “It’s time to move onto bigger and better things. I got my degree now.
I can be a real detective.”

“Your wife’s a dentist?” the man shook his head. “Get out of
this business while you still can.”

“It’s something in my blood.” Larry replied truthfully.

“You heard about Timmons?” the man asked.

“Timmons?” Larry knew he was bad at names now. A man whose
name he couldn’t remember was asking about another name he couldn’t remember.

“Yeah, the FBI Agent you worked with before the flood.” The
man said.

“What?”

“They found him dead up in Montana.” The man replied as he
left the locker room. “Suicide. He’s the one that kept trying to find Fuller.
He never gave up on that, you know?”

“Yeah?” Larry replied. “I think she drowned.” And Larry
never wished for anything to be true like he did that.

Two years, six months later….

Susan brushed her
daughter’s hair while listening out to whatever it was that had made Timmy go
silent. A quiet little boy was a little boy making trouble for his mother and
Susan silently slipped away from her daughter to find her son contemplating a
climb up the drawers of the cabinets to gain the countertop where cookies were
cooling.

“You were not, were you?” Susan arched an eyebrow at him and
Timmy fled to the safety of the living room where Larry was supposed to be
watching him, but had fallen under the spell of a football game. What on earth
is he going to be like when he’s big, Susan wondered and she knew, if genetics
meant anything, he would be a lot like his father.

Larry’s sister was coming down in the next day or two and
all four kids of the cousins would be together for the first time. Debbie was
barely two, her brother Timmy nearly five, and Bryce’s two were just a bit
older. Susan couldn’t see how Bryce and Larry grew up in the same household but
her sister in law still had that heart of gold thing going for her. The tattoos
were a bit much for Susan and she fought back the images of Debbie getting
inked up like that when she was old enough. It had been since…Susan went
through the math in her head, damn, well over a year since she and Larry had a
weekend away together. It was time. Whatever else could be said about Bryce,
children and dogs loved her. Was it time to get the kids a dog? Susan smiled at
the thought. Another child, but in fur.

Destin was as far from Jacksonville Florida, where they had
moved over two years ago as any place could be and still be in the state. Susan
loved the white beaches and clean water. Larry liked to drink beer and float.
They had made a vow of silence, to never speak of certain things, unless it was
absolutely certain no one else could hear them. Larry pushed Susan out on a
float until they were a hundred yards out or so.

“Are you sure about this?” Larry asked.

“Yes,” Susan replied and put a hand on his shoulder. He was
still working out and it was still working. “The kids need to grow up in a
smaller town. But not too small, Bryce has a perfect set up and she needs some
help. And she has a fenced in backyard.”

“You never let up, do you?” Larry laughed. “Yes, we will get
a dog.”

“You’ll like it out west.” Susan told him. “And we need to
put some distance between us and the past. I can set up shop anywhere. You can
finish your next degree. I need an accountant and we need to be able to explain
why we’re, uh, well off.”

“As long as there is beer, and the kids, and you.” Larry
sighed.

“And a dog.”

Susan walk along the beach alone. Larry was napping at the
hotel after they had feasted on fresh seafood and great wine. She had slipped
away unnoticed and she hoped to be back long before he awoke. She cut back up
to the hotel with the lighthouse on top of it, and then down a side street,
away from the tourists. There was a pink house with a sign out front that read,
“Madam Murrey Fortune Teller” and Susan went into the house without knocking.

“Yes, may I…” a small woman with grey hair walked into the
room but stopped speaking when she saw Susan. “Who are you?” she asked.

“You’re a psychic and you don’t know who I am?” Susan
laughed bitterly. “Yet I found you.”

“I knew you would come one day, Susan.” Christa said as she
sat down across the table from Susan. “You were one of the few people I could
never see. I thought that was perhaps because you could see me. I was right.”

“Your vision was derived from death, my own from childbirth,”
Susan said, “and no, Larry doesn’t know where I am, or where you are.”

“What do you want?” Christa asked.

“I have something for you.” Susan slid a large envelope across
the table. “There’s fifty grand in there. I recommend some place outside of the
states.”

“I understand.” Christa said but she didn’t pick the
envelope up.

“You were already out of that cell before the dam broke,
weren’t you?” Susan grinned. “You conned Timmons into helping you get out right
before all hell broke loose. Once the power was down and the walls fell you two
just walked right out of the front door.”

“The more simple a plan is the better chance there is that
it will work.” Christa smiled. “You of all people should know that.”

“I know that the
further away you are the safer my family will be.” Susan said bluntly.

“You still know that Larry and I killed someone.” Susan said
as she stood up. “That will hang over our heads forever and I won’t risk my
kids to see you put to sleep like an ailing pet.” Susan hesitated. “Why did you
never have kids, Christa?”

“The abuse from my stepfather damaged me.” Christa told her.

“You wanted to, didn’t you?” Susan pressed.

“Yes,” Christa looked away, “your vision is clear.”

“Yeah, I thought so,” Susan walked to the door and turned
around, “and that too, I think you’re a product of how men treat women, and I
can’t say I condone what you do or what you’ve done or what you will do, but
maybe one day you’ll make someone think about it.”

“I still have no idea why I cannot see you and you can me.”
Christa said.

“Leave the country.” Susan replied. “And you’ll never have
to worry about seeing me again. If you don’t I’ll take it as a threat.”

“I already know you are capable of killing, Susan, and I
know he will kill for you, and I know the two of you would blot me out of this
world with less care than you did for your lover.” Christa opened the envelope
and smiled. “I will leave the two of you alone, and I will go to Mexico.”

“Are you capable of not killing?” Susan asked.

“No.” Christa whispered.

“Good bye.” Susan said as she walked out of the house and
closed the door behind her.

Susan walked back to the beach and looked behind her. She
felt as if Christa was going to follow her, or harm her, she would know. Susan
closed her eyes and allowed the world to flow around her. She waded out into the
water and sat down in the clear sea. One more, she thought, a boy, a girl, and
a surprise, this time, she wouldn’t look, but she had stop taking the pill over
a month ago. Here, in this place, at this time, she would conceive once more,
for the last time. Her vision cleared and she saw a small woman, with grey hair
and her back bent, passing into Mexico where she would lose her aged appearance,
and once again, hunt.

Susan stood up and walked back to the hotel room and woke
her husband up. “Get me pregnant,” she said.

Sunday, November 1, 2015

It’s an odd feeling. Suppose at any given moment during the
day someone asked you how your socks felt and unless there was something stuck
in one of them, or they had gotten wet, or it was cold out and you were wearing
wool socks, you might not have noticed them at all. It’s that kind of feeling.
I’m dreaming and I know I’m dreaming but it’s a Sock Feeling, that knowing that
I’m dreaming, and it feels good to be sitting in the park again.

There’s several dreamscapes that reappear in my dreams and
one is of a small, clean, and neat little city where there’s never any people
but the buildings are nice. There’s a long rectangular park, greenspace
surrounded by buildings on the west end and homes by the time the park ends at
the east end. There’s a walking track around it and the track had two colors;
one for runners and the others for those who walk, and the walkers walk
counterclockwise and the runners run in the opposite direction. There are three
fountains and each of them look exactly the same. One is near the west end, one
in the middle, and one near the east end. I know this city by heart, but most
of my wanderings, in my dreams, have come on the east end where the comfortable
homes with their nice lawns are. There’s a house there, a normal looking wood frame
house with a porch and shutters and columns on the porch to hold the roof up
over the porch but everything is painted white. Trim, the front door, the
swing, the columns and even the mailbox hanging beside the front door is
painted picket fence white.

There’s a building near the west end of the park and I got
lost in that building one day because of all the sameness in it but other than
that building and that white house, and the three fountains, now that I think
on it, everything else is just as normal as anywhere else I’ve been. I’m
sitting on a park bench looking west and the top of the building, which looks
like a five story office building of some sort, is perfectly aligned with the
the fountain, which has three fluted tiers for the water to flowing into and
drop out of, and I can tilt my head, change the focus of my eyes, and it looks
like the top part of the fountain is sitting on top of the building.

That would be different, if an office building had water
slowly moving through it all day. The workers would wear swimsuits and paddle
around the break room but cell phones would be out of the question or enclosed
in waterproof cases. I like the idea of an office building being part of a
fountain and I like watching the sun going down and the water lights up.

“Human create their own viruses” a man sitting next to me
says and he wasn’t there a second ago. Scared the hell out of me he did, but I
stay asleep. “Ebola is being found dormant in survivors and we don’t know why
it’s there but our bodies keep it alive. We’ve been looking for the host all
these years and we never realize it was us. But that’s what we do,” the man
adds with a sigh, “we keep alive those things that keep repeating themselves;
reproduction is why we exist and it is our existence. We create the viruses to
kill off enough people so the rest of us can survive, so even when we kill it’s
so that we can keep replicating. It’s like throwing up to eat more.” The man
falls silent and I wonder if he’s about to pull a knife or something. He looks
homeless, like someone with nowhere to go and all the time on earth to get
there, but he’s nearly lucid, as if part of him resides in the real world while
part of him is living in a dream.

To a degree he can’t be argued with. The office building has
identical floors, someone, even if it was me, designed the park with matching
fountains. It’s only recently that people thought that mismatched socks might
be cool. But even in our works that are vastly different those works are very
much the same, are they not? Look at “Lord of the Rings”. It’s still made out
of the same letters that some child’s story about a frog who became king of New
York. Each person is made up of the same genetic building blocks as the amoeba
floating around in the water spilt from the fountain.

The sameness of our world catches up with me as I wonder why
humans react so strongly against anything that is new or different or alien.
Could it be that we’re hardwired to see anything that isn’t replication as a
threat? I hear him get up and move away from me and I’m glad to be alone again.
The sun is sinking lower than the building and the light begins to fade. I know
I cannot stay here much longer and I feel the urge to walk, to move from one
place to another, the ultimate act of replication as one foot is put in front
of another and repeated endlessly. Is this why so many of the homeless drift
from one place to another? It’s an act of repeating, of creating another
version of something the same; the day before.

“I’ve seen you here before” the woman says and this time I
half expected it. She’s replaced the homeless man and it almost looks like
she’s wearing his coat. She’s a small woman but she’s wearing a winter coat
that covers most of her body, and only her legs from the knees down are
visible. She’s Asian, maybe, but the accent is European. Her face smiles from
the eyes and I have to remember it’s impolite to stare.

“Yes” I reply simply and I stifle the urge to tell her she’s
beautiful. It’s the eyes, really, dark brown to the point of liquidity. It’s never a good thing to tell a beautiful
woman she’s beautiful until after she has allowed, until after she has
encouraged, the first kiss. She’s been told she’s beautiful endlessly,
thoughtlessly, as all beautiful women have been, and it’s meaningless to her
now, and it will be until there’s an emotional charge, a lightning strike, that
goes with it.

“I went to Paris with some friends,” she tells me as she
reads my thoughts, “and the first morning we were there a man took my picture,
came in from my right side and surprised me by snapping a photo of my face, and
he was no more than a meter away from me. It irritated me, shocked me a little,
and I wondered what the hell he thought he was doing.” She stopped and shifted around and she looked
at me as if she wondered if I was still listening. I tried not to stare at her
legs. I could tell she had some serious inkworks but I couldn’t see the
details. She continued…

“Later that day, we were standing in line at The Louvre when
he came up to us. He was with a tall blonde woman who translated for him. He
didn’t realize I spoke German, and I knew enough French to be dangerous. The
blonde’s name was Kathy and she told me that he wanted to sculpt me. Yes, here
I am, an American tourist in Paris, there for less than a week, and this man
wants to turn me into a piece of artwork.” She laughed as if she still found it
amusing but at the same time she looked as if the wonderment of it all still
surrounded her at all times. “I said no, but when he looked at me I knew that
he knew I would do it. Kathy wrote down an address to his workshop where he
trained students and did his own work. My friends were totally against it, but
later, after we had been drinking French wine for far too long, we decided to investigate
him.

His name was Lexington, no last or first name, and he was
locally famous in Paris. Kathy and he were in nearly every photo of his work,
when anyone at all was, and his studio/ workshop/ classroom was in a building
that was an abandoned factory of some sort. We had to go, just to look, and we
did.

There were a dozen students inside, all of the working on
stone, rock, anything difficult and impossible, this is where it was born. No
one stopped working, no one looked up as we entered the building but Kathy
greeted us, in a fashion, and she told me that I would be allowed to go further
but my friends would not. There was no way they would leave me alone in a
strange building in Paris but I surprised them and followed her to an ancient
elevator that was powered by students who suddenly rushed to turn the wooden
wheel that operated it. It creaked and shuddered as if it might fall apart
itself but we arrived at the second floor.

The workshop had in it several amazing pieces of artwork,
carved out of stone, and it was like standing at the birthplace of creation.
Here, was a life sized sculpture of a little boy, his left hand outstretched,
palm upwards, with a tiny stone toad craved out of the same rock as the hand
yet seemingly independent. Kathy translated from the Lexington, no, not Lexi,
or Lex, that this was to be a memorial for a child who had died very young and
his parents wanted a memorial that would matter and reflect. There was a statue
of carved pillar of stone; its detail painfully exquisite. It was a match to
one found at Pompeii and accidently destroyed. This was to be the replacement.

‘Why am I here?’ I had to ask the question even though there
would be no other reason for me to be there.

They led me to a corkboard on the wall where the photo of my
face had been printed out. I had turned towards him in surprise and slight
irritation. There were red marks on the photo as if he had been making
measurements. He pointed to a massive piece of marble in the middle of the
floor, it looked as if it were half a mountain to me, and told me he wanted to
carve this into me, and me into this.

How could anyone say no to becoming art? It would be me but
three times my size, to scale, and I went down to say good bye to my friends
and to tell them I would be staying. When I returned to the workshop he
photographed my face again, and my body in various positions. Kathy told me
that I could keep my clothes on and I knew that before we truly began that I
would be nude. I had never taken my clothes off for a stranger. I had never
taken someone I didn’t know as a lover and every women who has a young daughter
knows that each encounter with a man might be the same encounter her daughter
might have, years later. A mother wants her daughter to be immunized to mistakes
her mother has made but deep down inside she knows that physical attraction is
an addiction very few can withstand. Even as this young man with a small beard
and a covering of dust studied me I knew that he was thinking of more than just
a woman made of stone and despite myself, I was thinking of what it would feel
like to be more than made of stone. The divorced had crippled me emotionally
yet in this ancient building with a piece of a mountain waiting to be a mirror,
I felt the stirrings of life again.

What does a woman tell her family, her friends, her
employer, herself, when at thirty years old she quits her life to stay in Paris
to become a model? Yet my children were young and they would agree it was the
right thing to do, and forever they would live to see the day they might dare
some adventure. But yes, it was selfish of me, and the second day that I spent
sitting for hours, first in one position and then another, with a man standing,
walking around me, looking at me closely, standing across that great room from
me, and asking me, motioning to me for he spoke little English and I very
little French, finally, I walked out and gathered my things at the hotel, and I
moved into the studio. It was an explicit surrender to the process and to the
artist. It also prompted Kathy to move out.”

I began losing her. The sun was going down and I knew when
darkness fell things would change. She curled up on the bench and faced me, and
suddenly, I knew under that coat she wore nothing at all, and she had walked
around the city, naked but covered, that day.

“The next day I took my clothes off for the first time for a
stranger and sat still and waited. My body reacted to his words, his gestures,
his gentle repositioning, but he didn’t touch me except as an artist. There was
to be another two days of this, with he looking and I sitting still, he would
touch me, reposition me, guide me, and I could feel my body willfully obey and
my mind saying it was madness and my heart saying to leap into this. Finally on
the fourth day we kissed and for that moment on my body was his to command
during the process and during the night. We lived together, cooked together,
drank together, and we turned a stone into a reflection of who I looked like
during this time.

It was finished. I stood and marveled at it and that
expression on my face was the very first and the very same in the photo. Kathy
returned, as she always did, for the one feature what was not mine was the long
hair of the statue, which belonged to her; I cut mine before the trip, from
past my shoulders to as short as you see me wearing now. Oddly, he meant to
carry the sculpture out to sea and leave it in water that was ten meters deep.
It was a popular site for divers and forever I would remain there, with that
expression on my face as they explored me. I returned home to my family and
everyone was excited over what had happened. It was difficult for me to explain
what had happened to me in the last nine months, but it was the same length of
time as a pregnancy but this time I had given birth to myself.”

Without another word she got up and walked away, a slight
swaying in her walk as if she were still at sea, still adrift, but happily, in
the City of Dreams.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.